HOW TO CLONE A FAILED AIX UNIX DISK –

By Austin Amuok, Vice President, Technology, Digital Document

Solutions Inc, San Antonio, TX

Problem: An AIX unix server RS6000 with a failed disk. AIX system 4.3.2.0 had
two disks both in the rootvg volume.The system consisted of two 2G SCSI disks.
hdisk1 had failed. The AIX SCSI disk was making sounds. The unix crashed and
nobody could use the system.

Solution;
We needed to recover as much data as possible from the failed disk. We had an
identical 2G SCSI disk and wanted to desperately clone the bad disk. We tried
using norton ghost 9.x but this failed all the time. Norton never liked it when we
connected both the disks. None of the disks would be considered primary or
source. Yet one had to be the source and the other the destination. We tried
messing with the SCSI id but it never worked. If you want to clone a unix SCSI
data disk, norton ghost may not be your answer.

Finally we turned to good old dd commands. Both disks were put in the sever.
The failing disk was hdisk1 and the new disk was hdisk3. To see the devices the
AIX command is lscfg. I had to do quite a bit of research but did find several
helpful websites with awesome information. I also downloaded the ibm redbook
on AIX which was invaluable. My first command quickly threw an AIX data read
error, this is expected since sections of the disk could not be read.

dd if=\device\hdisk1 of=\device\hdisk3

I then modified my command to tell the dd command not to stop but to glide over
bad sectors of the disk. The dd command run for almost eight hours. But in the
morning I had a cloned copy of hdisk1. We then recovered bad files from the
backups.

dd if=\device\hdisk1 of=\device\hdisk3 conv=noerror

A good AIX command to see which disks are doing what is

lsdev -C -c disk

I used cpio commands to read the backup tapes.

Helpful Links:
http://duggmirror.com/linux_unix/Clone_your_hard_drive_with_open_source_software/
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.unix.aix/2003-05/0291.html
http://www.dbforums.com/showthread.php?p=2897456
http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/dd.shtml
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/aix/aixprob/msgdnref/7digitrecov.htm#BA8A6B6075janb
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=302449
http://www.nabble.com/disk-cloning-with-dd-t4737.html
http://unixarticles.com/articles/67/1/Removing-and-Replacing-a-Fixed-Disk-in-AIX
https://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-dutta_cmds.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aix-faq/part1/preamble.html
http://www.hccfl.edu/pollock/Unix/FindCmd.htm
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/IBMp690/IBM/usr/share/man/
info/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixbman/baseadmn/conf_disk_drive.htm
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/IBMp690/IBM/usr/share/man/
info/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixbman/baseadmn/phys_vol.htm#HDRA72F0C4

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